It's not that deep

It's not that deep

Going through my nephew's quantitative reasoning homework, it was a confusing group of numbers, mind you, this was the examples they cited.

I didn't dive into the one he did because I needed to understand what the assignment was before vetting his work.

Lo and behold, I sat there confused, trying to decipher the cluster of numbers. I wasn't so good at mathematics in secondary school so I always approached anything related to maths with depth and seriousness because I felt everything about it was just complicated.

I sat there for about a few minutes and I still wasn't getting it, then I called him since he had already done it and it was his work after all.
I hope he doesn't see me as "not smart" 😂 but the 8 year old boy didn't think too much before he explained what the goal of the assignment was and me the adult aunty was racking my brain for an assignment that was simply "ascending order"

“Ohhh” I said, dismissing him
My brain was in defense mode. Maths had made me like this.

Simplicity is something to learn from children.

What was in that book is nothing similar to what I had experienced. My experience then had clouded my thinking. I didn't want to “not think hard” because this was maths now, but then I gave myself unnecessary work.

Do you have any of such similar experience? How do you handle it?